Songs without Words: Literature and Music

Songs without words: literature and music?

5 sessions

This interdisciplinary series will examine a series of issues concerning the relationship between literature and music. An ancient connection

This fascinating day will be clarified and demonstrated both through discussions of the works of Bani writers and poets

Different generations, that music occupies a special place in their world, are through listening to different works.

The program of the meetings

1.  Literature and music: a story of friendship or a story of rivalry?

We will open with a historical introduction to the long and complex relationship between literature and music, and we will focus on the tension between the need to create form and the urge to break form. We will present some intriguing meeting points between the worlds of words and sounds. We will conclude our journey by examining this connection against the background of the tremendous flourishing of all the arts in the first half of the 20th century and the rift created by World War II in all fields of art.

2.   "The Blue Pianos": The piano in literature

Will the piano vacate its historical place - as the virginal, the clavichord,

The harpsichord - for the benefit of its electronic descendants? Is its mass production considered living evidence

To reproduce art and art tools? Do his knocks and caresses defy the existing or are they not

But his approval? We will discuss these questions by reading some poems and novels, that the piano

occupies a central place in them.

3.   to write literature like music

Is there any "music" of prose or poetry? We will discuss selected works of literature that place a musical theme in their center and works of literature based on a "musical" model, such as "The Drowning" by Thomas Bernhard and "Jazz" by Toni Morrison.

4.  The music of poetry

How does "the music of poetry" reflect reality? We will discuss the poet TS Eliot's poem "The Music of Poetry" and wonder about the meaning of the social reality hidden behind central aesthetic polemics dealing with the connection between the arts.

5.  "Every time I play": on the composition "Poets' songs"

We will discuss some central melodies of "poets' songs" by Mati Caspi, Rona Keenan, Alon Olarchik, Shlomo Gronich, Yoni Rechter and others. We will even get to know some of the melodies, harmonies and musical instruments hidden among the lines of different poets like Natan Zach, Leah Goldberg, Yair Horvitz, Dalia Rabikovitz and others.

*The lecture will be held on Zoom, a link to the lecture will be sent to mobile / email